There are certain situations where you have blocked access for selected countries from your store using Country Blocker Add-on in Cozy Country Redirect but when you check your store’s status on Shopify Live View(Analytics) you might notice that you’re still getting visitors from those countries. It’s totally normal if this makes you panic! But you should not! I will explain why.
Who are these Visitors from Blocked Countries reported by Shopify?
Shopify Analytics is great. It gives you the means to review your store’s recent activity, get insight into your visitors, and analyze your store’s transactions with an easy to use interface. It is developed very keenly and hence those analytics work from the backend of your store.
Let me put it in simpler terms: Shopify handles the analytics from behind the curtains and hence it happens before our app can perform its magic on your store. So Analytics are registered before our Blocker shows up and therefore sometimes you might see it showing visitors from those blocked countries. Most of the time they aren’t even human visitors but are web crawlers or what we popularly know as “bots”. They are there just for web indexing and nothing else but since they are not using JS they cannot be intercepted by our app. A human user will be using JS from his/her browser almost all the time and hence our app won’t let them through.
Shopify Help Section has an article providing an inside look into possible discrepancies that occur in Analytics.
Article in Shopify Help Center: Analytics Discrepancies
What if the Visitor is a Human and not a Bot?
This is another likely scenario in which a person from one of your blocked countries visits your store. Shopify will still report it in its analytics but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the visitor is able to access your store. Our Blocker Template (provided in the app) is like a veil between the user from the blocked country and your store. Even if he/she has your store opened in the browser, they won’t be able to access anything or shop from your store since all they will be seeing is this:
Now while the visitor is seeing this it will still be reported in your Analytics but you don’t need to worry because apart from looking at this screen the visitor won’t be able to do anything else.
So to round it up we come back to “You don’t need to panic”. I hope now you know why.
Also, we are very quick in keeping our app upgraded. So in the future, if Shopify provides a solution for this we will implement it in the app right away.
If you still have some doubts you can always contact us at support@addons.business.